Female-driven stories made a good showing in September. Anthony Jaswinski sold two specs: May You Live in Interesting Times, an espionage action about a female assassin, based on a story by Jaswinski and Luke Goltz, and In the Deep, a suspense/thriller about a young woman stuck 20 yards offshore with a great white shark. Element Pictures optioned Laird Hunt’s novel Neverhome, a Mulan-esque story about a woman fighting for the Union, with Lenny Abrahamson attached to direct. The horror/thriller spec Scarecrow by Mike Scannell, in which a mother defends her daughters from a psychopath, is moving forward at Screen Gems and Unbroken Pictures. And finally, Mourning Glory has found Karen Leigh Hopkins (Because I Said So) to adapt Warren Adler’s black comedy about a single mother who attends funerals and hits on the rich, newly-widowed husbands.
Other script sales include:
– John Phillips’ Dirty Grandpa is moving forward with Zac Efron and Robert De Niro attached to star.
– Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind, The Da Vinci Code) has been brought on to Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Directive.
– 23 Jump Street, Top Gun 2, and CHiPs have all found new writers for the adaptations.
– The Salon.com article “The Craziest OkCupid Date Ever” to be adapted by Adam Brooks (Definitely, Maybe).
– Angelina Jolie producing/directing Africa by Eric Roth, a biopic about paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey.